Jeremy Harris

I made all our gaps 8mm, and TBH it doesn't look that out of place. I don't even notice them now. I did have one bathroom door that wasn't trimmed properly and only had a small gap under it, and it whistled a bit when closed. I took it off and trimmed it and it's now fine.

FWIW I've always used the epoxy ones. They are a bit more expensive but are tolerant of a bit of damp in the hole and are generally fool proof. My old garage has a range of them in the floor that I used to use for tie down points for load testing aircraft components, and although I was using them in a very poor way (applying tensile loads rather than shear as most are intended to take) I never ever had one fail. Depends what you want to use them for, but if they are always going into dry concrete the cheapest polyester/vinylester ones are fine. If there's a chance that the hole may be a bit damp then the epoxy ones are a bit better. TBH, for general building work, where they are going to be taking shear loads usually pretty much any of them will do the job, so I'd be inclined to choose on price and local availability.

It is, and I think if you regularly blow out the fan, heat sink, connectors etc it works fine. In this case I had to resort to using a small brush as the dust was caked on so hard on places that even 100psi through small nozzle wouldn't shift it! My fault for leaving the machine for so long without cleaning it, especially as I had an opportunity a year or so ago when I swapped the old hard drive over and added an SSD for the OS, user profiles and programmes. I should have cleaned it then, as it was looking pretty dusty, but I was in a rush to get it working again so didn't bother (there's probably a moral in there somewhere...............).

Definitely. It took me a good hour yesterday to clean the mother board of this PC. The caked on dust around the processor fan and cooler was a pig to remove, and the first memory slot is right next to the processor and was equally caked in very fine dust, as it seems the processor fan blows air out over it.

Well worth having another read of "A brief history of time". He's one person I would have really liked to meet. He also did a few cameo appearances that were brilliant, from appearing as as the voice of the book in the current new series of the "Hitch-hikers guide to the Galaxy" to the brilliant scene with him, Newton, Einstein and Data in star trek:

I'm sticking with Pale Moon. So far I've not seen any downside. It uses a lot less memory, is faster, works across different OS's seamlessly, has a an effective and secure sync feature and best of all looks and feels just like Firefox did before they messed up the user interface while ago.

Thanks to the generosity of @Onoff, the machine is now running on 8Gb and seems to be doing very well. One thing that I found was that I was getting some hard memory errors showing up with the original memory, when I swapped over I had a couple of ours faffing around the get things to work, the problem turned up to be lots of dust around the memory sockets. A good clean up and refitting the new (to me) memory fixed everything, and the machine's now running very nicely. I have a suspicion that the high number of hard memory errors may have been a contributory factor, but can't be sure.

Or just use an incognito or private session on your existing browser and don't log in. That won't have access to any cookies so will look just as if you're a guest viewing the forum.

You have to install the panel mounts and flashing before the tiles/slates go on, as they over/underlap them, so as long as the installer runs the cables in at the same time (which ours did as a matter of course) then things should be fine. Fitting the PV panels is best done after the slates/tiles have been laid, to avoid the very real risk of damage to the panels by the roofers.

Great news, Dave, let's just hope that the weather improves so you can crack on!

The law is the law, and I think I gave links to the case law defining a rateable hereditament in the other thread. Council tax cannot be charged unless a house is on the valuation register. It can only be put on the valuation register by the VOA. It can only be valued and placed on the register by the VOA if it meets the criteria laid down in the previously quoted case law, and the easy case to use is "Does the house have a potable water supply or not?" If the answer to that is "no", then it is, by law, not a rateable hereditament and so cannot be valued for Council Tax purposes and placed on the register. There are other criteria that are either defined in case law, or could be argued as placing the house outside the definition of a rateable hereditament; I only went as far as the water supply one as that was easy for me to control and prove if challenged. FWIW, the moment I started to quote the relevant case law to the council tax woman I was passed to their legal department, and after that the council just backed off very quickly indeed. They just sent me a very politely worded letter asking if I would please let them know when I considered the house was sufficiently complete to be valued for Council Tax. I delayed this right up to the completion inspection, by delaying getting the official public health water test (we're on a borehole), even though I knew from a private test that the water was OK. I only did this because the attitude of the council had got right up my nose, when they sent a snooper around..................

Found the calcs I did. The total voltage drop for the longest run over the roof was under 0.1%, so not worth worrying about.

Our cables run through 25mm flexible conduit, alongside a counterbatten and up and over the ridge and then down the roof the other side and out behind the wall cladding to the externally mounted inverter. Four cables (for two strings of panels) fitted easily inside 25mm flexible conduit OK.

Definitely looks to be a better arrangement to me!

That's just ludicrously close together, the figures that @PeterStarck gave in this post are a pretty good guide:

I've heard there are a lot of fake BME280s around, most seem to be really clones of the BMP280 being mis-sold (the BMP280 is the pressure and temperature only device). The ones I bought were clearly Chinese fakes - wrong package shape and size, wrong markings, plus some errors in the calibration constants.

There are clear examples around here of developers sitting on land and waiting for the "deliverable homes target" time to expire, so they can use that argument to gain PP for more land, before they've started building the homes that they got PP for two or three years before. Looking at the times scales it's pretty obvious that they game the system all the time, but then it's perfectly legal for them to do this, all they are doing is maximising their profits by exploiting the existing regulation. The margins in house building a pretty damned small, with most coming from the uplift in value of land when it gets PP, so, from a purely business point of view, who can blame the big developers for just exploiting the system? It's no different in principle to F1, where every trick in the book is used to stay "legal" yet gain a winning edge. One problem is that we seem to expect developers to have a social conscience, just because they are in the business of building homes. I've no idea why this is, but it's clearly a nonsense. I think the one thing that annoys me more than anything else is that we don't do enough to incentivise the re-use of existing developed land. It's often far more expensive to develop land that has been previously developed, so developers will naturally prefer green field sites. Around here there are lots of former light industrial and agriculture related sites that could be developed, yet instead we see the green fields alongside them having large developments built on, whilst the derelict brown field sites stay empty. Seems a bit of a nonsense to me.

The only time I installed an oil boiler I fitted a water trap/filter in the feed pipe. Not a cure for a lot of water in the tank, but a very good visual indicator of water being present, as the trap/filter had a glass bowl and water was clearly visible. If water does get into a tank, then doing as you do with aircraft fuel tanks on a regular basis, just carefully draining it off from the very bottom of the tank should work OK. Not hard to do, as long as the tank is set up properly with a very slight tilt towards the drain fitting, and suitable precautions are taken to deal with any possible contamination (including disposal of the drained-off water).

Welcome Andy, I considered using a RPi, but it's a real power hog, and as I want to power the remote sensor using a battery and solar panel, ruled it out just on that basis. Half an amp or more to keep a RPi ticking over versus less than 1mA for a PIC, made the decision for me a no-brainer. I'm probably going to store data locally in the unit, either on a µSD card or USB stick, as well as transmit data back to the house using an HC-12 433MHz transceiver. These have very good performance and offer better range than wifi,especially if run at low baud rates. Not sure yet what to do with the data at the house end, that may end up using a RPi or probably a PiZero, running a small display and maybe talking to the house LAN. The only reasonable NOX sensor I could find was the MICS 2714 (https://sgx.cdistore.com/datasheets/sgx/1107-Datasheet-MiCS-2714.pdf ) I'm currently playing with it, but like the PMS5003 it's a bit of a power hog, so I'll probably end up switching the sensors off between samples, to save power. My experience with solar powered external sensors is that power budget management is paramount, as it's not at all uncommon to have several cloudy days in a row (a bit like today) that results in very little battery charging. Battery capacity needs to be enough to run the unit for around 100 to 120 hours without charge, and the charging capacity needs to be able to deliver around 5 to 8 times the device energy use, just to ensure reliability. The BME280 is a pig of a thing to use, because of the relatively complex 32 bit maths needed to post-process the raw data and get something meaningful, so instead I've settled on using the SI7021 https://www.silabs.com/documents/public/data-sheets/Si7021-A20.pdf for the temperature and humidity measurement.

Welcome, I share @SteamyTea's curiosity. As a former scientist I started out from first principles to design a large gravity retaining wall, made some measurements of the max allowable soil bearing stress, knew the underlying ground conditions well (we had a water borehole drilled, so had a detailed hydrogeological survey) and then realised that, just to keep BC and our insurance people happy an SE would need to replicate the design. I went through the copy of his design calcs, and they were much the same as mine, but his final design was significantly more massive, with a margin that very much exceeded Eurocode 7 requirements. He was very good value in terms of what he delivered for the price though, it's just that his design used a fair bit more concrete and steel. Over the years it seems that foundation design in general has become increasingly more complex/costly, and I have a suspicion that some of this may be down to the "London effect" where so many houses built on London Clay decades ago have needed remedial foundation work. I'd be very interested why, apart from a natural desire to err on the side of conservatism (something I can understand - I used to design and build light aircraft as a hobby) this is so.

That's weird, as I had to format the 64Gb drive I have to ExFAT, specifically to get it to work with my netbook that runs XP. I'll have a play tomorrow to see what's going on, as having that stick formatted as ExFAT is a PITA.

The only reason for it being ExFAT usually is because it's too big a USB stick for Windows XP to natively read/write. XP was limited to FAT32, IIRC, so wouldn't handle large USB sticks, at least that's why I have a 64Gb stick that's formatted to ExFAT, simply for transferring stuff to an XP machine.

Yes, it's primarily a Linux development, but the ports to Windows for Chromium are flaky, I found, and not really being actively developed much. AFAIK, there's no easy way to sync Chromium on Linux with Chromium on Windows, either. It seems all the work is going in to Chrome, but that has so much Google proprietary stuff in it that I wouldn't use it. It's worth having another look at Pale Moon, though, I've been playing with it all afternoon and it's still pretty snappy and isn't using loads of memory. The only slight downside is that it's a bit more hassle to load add-ins, as a lot of Firefox add-ins don't work and the Pale Moon add-ins site is pretty hopeless, IMHO. I ended up having to grab a .xpi file from Github to get one add-in loaded, for example.

ExFAT is pretty much the only way to get something like a 64Gb USB stick to work with Windows XP, I've found. May be why this USB stick is formatted this way.

I've found that some flavours of Linux are OK'ish with ExFAT, some aren't. Mint is sort of OK and will read an ExFAT USB stick OK, but throws a wobbly when trying to write to it. I only have one ExFAT formatted USB stick, solely because it's the only format that works for large USB sticks with Windows XP, and I still have a Win XP netbook. @PeterW's suggestion is the one I use when this happens, but I'll copy the files across to a stick that's formatted with something like NTFS, as that seems to work with most newer Windows systems and every Linux system I've tried it with. I try not to have any sticks formatted to something like ext3 or ext4 unless I have to, as it's a pain loading stuff to Windows to allow them to work.